INTRODUCTION TO

LINGUISTICS
Fall 2009-2010
The Nature of Human Language
 Linguists understand language as a system of
arbitrary vocal signs.
 Language is rule-governed, creative, universal,
innate, and learned, all at the same time.
 It is also distinctly human.
The Nature of Human Language
• We generally think of language as functioning to give expression to
our thoughts (“language as a vehicle for thought”),
• to transmit information (the “communicative function”), or
• perhaps to provide the raw material for works of literature (the
“narrative function”).
• But language has many more functions, for example, to get others to
do things, to express emotions or feelings, to maintain social
intercourse (as in greetings or talk about the weather — the “phatic”
function),
• to make promises, to ask questions, to bring about states of affairs, to
talk to oneself, and
• even to talk about language itself, what is known as metalanguage
‘language turned back on itself ’, which is common in everyday life,
not just among linguists.
Linguistic Signs
 In the view of linguists, human language consists
of signs, which are defined as things that stand for
or represent something else.

 Linguistic signs involve sequences of sounds which

represent concrete objects and events as well as
abstractions.
Linguistic Signs
 Signs may be related to the things they represent in a number of ways. The
philosopher C. S. Peirce recognized three types of signs:

 a. iconic, which resemble the things they represent (as do, for example,
photographs, diagrams, star charts, or chemical models);

 b. indexical, which point to or have a necessary connection with the

things they represent (as do, for example, smoke to fire, a weathercock to
the direction of the wind, a symptom to an illness, a smile to happiness, or
a frown to anger); and

 c. symbolic, which are only conventionally related to the thing they

represent (as do, for example, a flag to a nation, a rose to love, a wedding
ring to marriage).
Icon
• It turns out that there is very little in language which is
iconic.
• Onomatopoeic words, which resemble the natural
sounds they represent, are a likely candidate.
• However, while “bowwow” might represent the sound
of a dog in English, for example, other languages
represent the sound quite differently (for example,
“guau” in Spanish or “amh-amh” in Irish).
• So even such words seems to be highly
conventionalized.
• Certain aspects of word order are indeed iconic.
Index
 A few aspects of language are indexical, such as
the demonstrative pronouns this or that.

 They point to the things they represent as close to

or far away from the speaker, or

 Adverbs such as now and then, which denotes the

moment of speaking or after (or before) the
moment of speaking, respectively.
Symbol
 Most language, however, is symbolic. Ferdinand de Saussure
— a Swiss scholar whose work is often said to have been the
beginning of modern linguistics—stated that the relation
between the linguistic sign and what it signifies is
conventional or arbitrary.
 By an arbitrary connection, he meant that the sequence of
sounds constituting a word bears no natural, necessary,
logical, or inevitable connection to the thing in the real world
which it names.
 Speakers must agree that it names that thing. Since there is no
motivation for the connection, speakers must simply learn it.
Symbol
• Speakers of English, for example, have entered into
a social agreement that the word apple stands for a
particular fruit; there is no resemblance between
the sound of the word and the appearance or taste
of the fruit.
• However, like all social agreements, such as those
concerning dress or manners, linguistic agreements
can be changed: English speakers could, for
example, agree to call an apple a pall.
The Rule-Governed Nature of Language

• Language consists of signs occurring not in a random

collection, but in a system.
• A system consists of smaller units which stand in
relation to each other and perform particular functions.
• These smaller units are organized on certain principles,
or rules. For this reason, language is said to be rule-
governed.
• The rules of a language, or its underlying system, are
inferable from the observable patterns of the language.
The Rule-Governed Nature of
Language
 This underlying system constitutes what is called grammatical
competence, which is part of native speakers’ implicit knowledge, their
“internalized grammar”;
 while grammatical competence is complete and perfect, it should be
remembered that speakers’ actual use of language, what is called
performance, may be quite incomplete and imperfect.

 A helpful analogy that might be made is to the score of a symphony—

which, like competence is perfect and unchanging —and to the orchestra’s
playing of the symphony — which, like linguistic performance, may be
inexact or may contain errors and which changes on each occasion of
playing.
The Rule-Governed Nature of Language

• The rules of language act as a kind of constraint on what is

possible in a language.

• For example, in the area of syntax, the rules of English

permit I like soap operas or Soap operas I like, but not
*Like soap operas I (* means ungrammatical, not permitted
by the rules of the language).

• In respect to word formation, overnight is a possible verb

expressing a length of time (as in The climbers overnighted
on a rock ledge), but midnight, since it expresses a point in
time, is not a possible verb (as in *The revelers midnighted
in the streets).
The Rule-Governed Nature of Language

• The phonological rules of English would permit the word

prace (though it does not exist), but would not generate
the word *psabr.

• Furthermore, we know by the morphological rules of the

language that if prace were a verb, the past tense would
be praced, pronounced with a final “t” sound (not the
“d” or “ed” sound that is found in other past tense
forms), and if prace were a noun, the plural would be
praces, pronounced with a final “ez” sound (not the “s”
or “z” sound that is found in other plural forms).
Language Universals, Innateness, and
Creativity
• A more general set of constraints on language is known as language
universals.
• These are features of language which are not language-specific; that
is, they would be found in all languages of the world.
• If one considers the order of the three main sentence elements, the
subject (S), the verb (V), and the object (O), there are only three
basic word orders that occur with any frequency among world
languages, namely, SVO, SOV, and VSO, even though logically
three other orders would be possible (VOS, OVS, OSV).
• It may turn out to be the case that certain grammatical categories
(such as number), functions (such as subject), and processes (such
as passive) are universal.
• One consequence of the notion of universals is that language
appears to be more motivated (that is, iconic) than previously
assumed.
Language Universals, Innateness, and
Creativity
• Inherent in the notion of universals is the belief that human
language is innate, that we are born with an inborn capacity for
language acquisition and are genetically equipped to learn a
language (not a specific language, but human language in general).
• This “genetic predisposition” to learn a language is thought to
account for the speed and ease with which children learn their first
language during a crucial period of language acquisition (birth to
age four), despite the fact that the linguistic data that they hear is
incomplete, that they receive no negative evidence, and that they are
seldom explicitly “taught” or corrected.
• Of course, children must be exposed to a language in order to
acquire it, so language is in part learned as well as innate.
Universals are clearly a consequence of the genetic endowment of
human beings for language.
Language Universals, Innateness, and
Creativity
• Despite the general and language-specific constraints on the
form of language, we also consider language to be creative,
or infinite.
• The first aspect of creativity is that human beings can
produce and understand novel sentences and sometimes
even new words. In fact, it is likely that no sentence that
you have read so far in this text is one that you have
encountered before.
• The second aspect of creativity is that we can create
sentences of (theoretically) infinite length (as in the nursery
rhyme This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat
that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built),
although there are obviously practical limits on length.
Animal Communication Codes
• Human language is uniquely human. Language is what
distinguishes human beings from other animals. While
many animals have codes of communication, these
differ in important ways from human language.
• Most animal language is indexical and “stimulus
bound”, depending on the necessary presence of
concrete stimuli. The topic of conversation must be
present in the immediate environment; it cannot be
displaced in time or space.
• Animal communication codes may also be iconic and
natural, but they are not symbolic.
Animal Communication Codes
• Furthermore, although the codes may be structurally quite complex,
they are finite, not infinite or creative; there is a closed repertory of
utterances.
• The codes are acquired exclusively through genetic transmission,
not learned, whereas, as we have seen, human language is both
innate and learned.
• Animals always give primary responses, while human beings often
give secondary responses, reacting to how something is said rather
that what is said.
• Human beings may also use language to refer to abstractions or
nonexistent entities; they can use language to lie, exaggerate, or
mislead; and they can use it metalinguistically. None of these is
possible within an animal communication code.
The Nature of Grammar
• In linguistics, the term is used to refer to the rules or
principles by which a language works, its system or
structure. Speakers of a language all have an
internalized grammar (their competence), whether they
can articulate the rules of the language or not.
•

• Throughout the ages, grammarians and linguists have

been attempting to formulate the speakers’ grammar in
a set of rules, though it is probably fair to say that they
have not yet been able to do so completely for any
language. This sense of grammar is known as
descriptive grammar.
The Nature of Grammar
• A different sense of grammar is known as prescriptive
grammar, which involves attempts to establish and
maintain a standard of correctness in the language, to
“prescribe” (dictate) and “proscribe” (forbid) certain
ways of speaking.

• But this has little to do with the actual working of the

language. It is only in a prescriptive sense that we can
talk about “good” grammar or “bad” grammar;
prescriptive grammar involves value judgments based
on factors external to language — such as, social class
or level of education.
The Nature of Grammar
• if you say Cat the the dog chased you are not speaking
English; the sentence is ungrammatical. Hearers might
well have trouble understanding you (Is the dog
chasing the cat or the cat chasing the dog?).

• However, if you say He did good on the exam, your

sentence is grammatical and would be understood by
all, but many people would find your sentence
unacceptable; they would consider it “bad”,
“nonstandard”, or “incorrect” English.
Fallacies concerning Grammar
• One fallacy is that there are languages that have
“no” grammar or “little” grammar.
• If grammar is defined as the principles by which a
language operates, it must be recognized that every
language has a grammar and that each language’s
grammar is completely adequate.
• It is certainly true that there are different types of
grammars — such as the widely divergent
grammars of Chinese, German, Turkish, or Cree—
but these are all equally operative.
Fallacies concerning Grammar
• A related fallacy is that certain types of grammars are
simpler and hence more “primitive” than others, while
other grammars (particularly grammars which make use
of inflections, or word endings, to express distinctions)
are more complex and hence more advanced.

• This view was widely held in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, but was dispelled by the discovery
that supposedly primitive languages (for example the
American Indian languages)had extremely complex
grammars.
 Fallacies concerning Grammar
• Another fallacy about the form of grammars, which was also current in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was that grammars should be logical
and analogical (that is, regular).
• So strong was this belief that there were a number of attempts to eliminate
supposedly illogical features of English grammar, such as the use of two or
more negatives for emphasis, which was common prior to the eighteenth
century, but was then judged by principles of logic to make a positive.
While some of this “language engineering” was successful, grammars do
not naturally follow logical principles.
• There is some drive towards regularity in language, as when children make
“analogical mistakes”, producing a regular form such as take/taked for the
irregular take/took.
• However, there are opposing forces — often changes in pronunciation —
• which serve to make language irregular, so no perfectly regular language
exists.
Fallacies concerning Grammar
• A fallacy about changes in grammar is that they result
in deterioration, or, alternatively, evolution. Again, it
would be difficult to define what is meant by
grammatical “evolution” or “deterioration”.
• There is no doubt that languages change over time,
sometimes in quite radical ways, but the changes do
not seem to entail an advancement or a loss of any
kind; the status quo is maintained.
• Furthermore, changes in language are not entirely
random, but often proceed in certain predictable ways
(known as drift) and by a number of quite well
understood mechanisms.
Fallacies concerning Grammar
• It is often believed that people are taught the
grammar of their native language, but in fact little
conscious teaching of grammar occurs in the
critical period of language learning, apart from
rather sporadic corrections of wrong forms (as in,
“it’s not tooken but taken”).
• Children learn the language by hearing instances of
it, and, it is now believed, constructing their own
“internalized” grammar.
Linguistics and the Components of Language

• Linguistics is defined as the scientific study of

language systems.
• For the purposes of study, language is divided into
levels, or components.
• These components are conventional and, to some
extent, arbitrary divisions of linguistic
investigation, and although they are interrelated in
complex ways in the system of language, we treat
them more or less separately.
Phonology
• The first component is phonology (from the Greek word phone meaning
‘sound, voice’), the study of the speech sounds of a particular language.

• A subdivision of phonology is phonetics, the study of the speech sounds of

human language in general, either from the perspective of their production
(articulatory phonetics), their perception (auditory phonetics), or their
physical properties (acoustic phonetics).

• Although speech is a continuum of sound, it is possible to break it into

different types of sounds, known as consonants, vowels, and semivowels;
as well as how other features of sound, including stress and pitch, are
superimposed over these sounds.
Morphology
• The second component of language is morphology (from the Greek word morphe ‘form’).
Morphology is the study of the structure or form of words in a particular language, and of
their classification.

• While the concept of a word is intuitively clear, it is not easy to define it objectively (is ice
cream one word or two?), and morphology must begin by trying to formulate such a
definition.

• Morphology then considers principles of word formation in a language: how sounds combine
into meaningful units such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots, which of these units are distinctive
and which are predictable variants (such as a and an), and what processes of word formation
a language characteristically uses, such as compounding (as in roadway) or suffixing (as in
pavement).

• Morphology then treats how words can be grouped into classes, what are traditionally called
parts of speech, again seeking some objective criteria—either of form or of meaning—for
sorting the words of a language into categories.
Syntax
• The third component of language is syntax (from Greek suntassein ‘to put
in order’).

• Syntax is the study of the order and arrangement of words into larger
units, as well as the relationships holding between elements in these
hierarchical units. It studies the structure and types of sentences (such as
questions or commands), of clauses (such as relative or adverbial clauses),
and of phrases (such as prepositional or verbal phrases).

• Syntax is an extensive and complex area of language, and nearly one-third

of the textbook is devoted to the study of English syntax.

• The two components of morphology and syntax are sometimes classified

together as grammar.
Semantics
• The fourth component of language is semantics (from Greek semainein ‘to signify,
show, signal’).

• Semantics is the study of how meaning is conveyed, focusing either on meanings

related to the outside world (lexical meaning) or meanings related to the grammar
of the sentence (grammatical meaning). It is perhaps the least clear-cut area of
linguistic study.
•

• In studying meaning, we consider both the meaning of individual words (lexical

semantics) and the meaning which results from the interaction of elements in a
sentence (sentence semantics). The latter involves the relationship between syntax
and semantics.

• A further area of study, which is also treated here, is the meaning relationships
holding among parts in an extended discourse (discourse semantics).
Pragmatics
• A fifth component of language, not part of the traditional subdivision but
added in recent years, is pragmatics (from Greek pragma ‘deed, aVair’,
from prassein ‘to do’).
• Pragmatics is the study of the functions of language and its use in context.
• As was pointed out above, language, in addition to serving to
communicate information, actually has a variety of functions, including
the expression of emotion, the maintenance of social ties, and even the
performance of action (a statement such as I declare you guilty uttered by
a judge).
• Furthermore, in any context, a variety of factors, such as the age, sex, and
social class of the interlocutors and their relationships of intimacy and
power, influence the form of language used.